Lawrence M. DAWS (b.1927)

Lawrence Daws
(born 1927) is a Queensland based artist. He studied engineering and architecture at the
University of Adelaide before coming to Melbourne to study at the Melbourne
National Art School from 1950-1953. Daws
first attracted serious critical attention when he co-exhibited with Donald
Laycock, Clifton Pugh and John Howley at the Victorian Artists Society gallery
in Melbourne in 1955.

From 1958 to
1959 Daws lived and worked in Rome before moving to London in 1960, where he
lived for the next ten years. During
this period he travelled extensively throughout Europe, Russia, India, Mexico
and the U.S.A.. Returning to Australia
in 1970, Daws lived on Bribie Island, Queensland for four years where he became
friends with Ian Fairweather (Australia's most reclusive artist). In 1974 he moved to Owl Creek Farm in the
Glasshouse Mountains of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast which has been his home base
for most of his life since.

Daws’ earlier
works were, in keeping with his background in engineering and architecture,
concerned with the division of space and volume manifested in a formal language
of semi-abstract expressionist painting. His works became more romantic/realist and
atmospheric during the seventies when he started on his "Glasshouse
Mountain" series for which he won much fame.

Daws has
enjoyed a stellar professional career as a painter, having been selected to
participate in the Whitechapel and Tate Gallery exhibitions of Australian
Art,1961-62 and also representing Australia, alongside Charles Blackman and
Brett Whiteley, at the Second Biennale des Jeunes, Paris in 1962. He has won
the Dunlop Prize twice (1953 and 1954), the Italian Scholarship in 1957;
International award, Biennale des Jeunes, Paris, 1962; Silver medal in the
Bienal de San Paolo, Brazil, 1963 and the Georges Art Prize, Melbourne, 1977.

Critically
acclaimed for most of his professional life Daws has never attracted the same
popular attention and adulation of some of his contemporary's such as Whiteley,
Williams, Blackman, Brack, Boyd, Smart, Nolan, Perceval, Tucker or Friend.
Perhaps this can be explained by both the restrained nature of Daws himself
along with the particularly cerebral and personal qualities of his paintings.
His are not populist works, but more a personal journey of self-awareness and
discovery. His work is often more about
the formal qualities of paint itself: "Even when a painting is full of
menace, I try to paint it in a beautiful way so you're seduced by the paint
quality and you don't get subsumed by the horror" (Daws cited in an
interview in the Courier Mail, August 4, 2014).
As noted by art critic John McDonald: "He has been adored and
ignored, feted and forgotten in equal measure".

Daws is
represented in museums and galleries throughout the world, he has represented Australian
Art at the highest level, been the recipient of major awards, and mixed in
equal measure with some of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His work is such that it demands more from the
viewer than that of many of his contemporaries. One has to actually engage with his work, look
beyond the narrative to the physical qualities of the paintings themselves -
and then from this plasticity come back to the dialogue with which he wishes to
engage us. His work is serious painting
that demands serious attention.